Climate Change and Drought Tolerance: How to Combat Climate Change with DNA

Learning how plants survive droughts is crucial for the future. As our planet warms, more droughts may mean failed harvests. Now, scientists have discovered the underpinnings of drought tolerance in plants, which may help with the development of new, drought-tolerant strains.

Over the course of evolution, plants have developed mechanisms to adapt to dry periods. However, some species can better handle drought than others. Why is this? The scientists wanted to find out.

"We all expect that drought will be the major challenge for crop production in the near future," said Nam-Chon Paek, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Understanding drought-responsive signaling and the molecular and biochemical mechanisms of drought tolerance in model plants such as Arabidopsis and rich provide new insight into how to develop drought-tolerant crop plants through conventional breeding or biotechnological approaches."

In this case, the researchers took advantage of the sequenced genome of Arabidopsis thaliana. They examined it in order to find out the important underpinnings of drought responses in plants. The researchers analyzed plants mutated in a regulatory gene called NAC016 and found that the NAC016 mutant plants were the most resistant to drought.

The researchers then examined how this drought tolerance came about by comparing the set of expressed genes in the mutants to normal plants. They found that NAC016 is part of a mechanism to turn off response to drought. This is important since in the wild, plants likely evolved to keep the drought-response pathways inactive until needed so that they could save the energy the responses would require. For agricultural purposes, though, the ability to control when the pathway is on would be a great boon to developing drought-tolerant crops.

The findings are published in the journal The Plant Cell.

Related Stories

Plants May Not Grow Well Under Climate Change Temperatures

For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).